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An anonymous reader writes "Orphaned works legislation promises to open older forgotten works to new uses and audiences. Groups like ASMP think it's inevitable. But it comes with the risk of defanging protection for current work when the creator cannot be located. Photographer Mark Meyer wonders if orphaned works legislation also needs language to compel organizations like Facebook to stop their practice of stripping metadata from user content in order to keep new work from becoming orphans to begin with. Should we have laws to make stripping metadata illegal?"
The author notes that excessive copyright terms may be to blame; if that's the case why lobby for Orphaned Works legislation? On a related note, Rick Falkvinge asks if we should revisit the purpose of the copyright monopoly.

How can you ban people from deleting the meta data. Are you going to ban hex edditors or text edditors? What about file systems that don't support metadata like fat? Or what about when people don't like your naming/notation conventions will that be banned to? A while back I had a itunes giftcard that I wanted to redeem so I had to install itunes. It went through "cataloging my music library" instead it indescriminatly deleted meta data and other files and renaming and disorganizing many. How will they deal

Didn't I tell you? I told you, didn't I Listy? But no, you didn't listen to ol' Rimsy.

I told you about installing old software from the past, I told you about how Apple caused World War 3 through software alone, but you didn't listen.Now look what you have done, Holly can only speak in Esperanto. Now what will we do? Shout loudly at him?

How will they deal with faulty programs like that will they be liable for removal of metadata?

iTunes removes metadata on your personal files. Facebook is a completely different case. Anyone who puts two brain cells into it can see a fundamental difference in liability between software meant to organize a personal collection and software meant to facilitate public consumption of media. It would not be hard to pass a law requiring the preservation of copyright ownership metadata in file formats which support that metadata in software intended to be used for the public dissemination of media.

Wow, comparing stripping metadata to murder. Now I really have seen it all.

Making it illegal to mess with metadata has to be one of the most retarded things I've heard in a while. That's like telling someone they aren't allowed to rename files. If you have data you absolutely cannot live without being in your pictures, either encode a watermark into it or put the damn image somewhere on the picture in a non-compromising location. Modifying your pictures is something people aren't allowed to do because of co

The law doesn't have to say "it's illegal to change metadata", just that it's illegal to remove copyright attributions that would result in an erroneous orphan work. Stripping metadata is like removing the name-tag from someone's jacket or computer so that it becomes lost property. You hand it in, and when the owner doesn't claim it within 3 months, it becomes your property. But if you hadn't removed the tag, it would have been easy to reunite it with its owner. Removing identifying marks is dishonest, and potentially fraudulent.

The BBC is one of the groups supporting "orphan works" legislation in the UK, but the BBC routinely strips meta-data from readers' contributions to the site. Contributors could claim that the BBC misled them, claiming they would retain ownership of their works, but then failed to take insufficient measures to protect the rights that they had promised their readers. That sounds like a lawsuit in the making....

But as to the article, most of what people post on Facebook isn't copyrighted from the start. When you first create a work of art (writing, images, etc.) you have what is called a Manuscript Copyright. If you distribute the work, that inherent copyright vanishes.

Howdy, pard! When did you step out of your time machine? Cos the Berne Convention made it pretty clear that copyright requires neither registration nor notices, and is rather an automatic right granted to the creator of the work. The USA was a bit late in actually ratifying the treaty, and many claim that the current legislation is still in breach of Berne thanks to the prejudicial treatment of registered works in terms of damages, but still: technically, even the USA doesn't require registration.

For photo's at least, little did I know that my phone put so much Metadata in it. Geographical location? Standard on? I see this more as a security risk so I would say: law for mandatory stripping of Metadata.

no, in many cases such metadata would be good. if you show photos from some nice place, its a good feature, when the next user can just see the place on googlemaps. Who explicitly DOES NOT want it, can click the "strip place information" option.

I would like to limit a law to just protect the Author field and make it apply only tho software like iTunes and services like flikr or facebook.
A creator like you should not be hindered by law to strip all metadata by will.

Typically these types of laws prohibit $ACTIVITY "without authorization by the copyright holder." Since you'll be the copyright holder in these situations, you'll be allowed to do whatever you want with your own photos.

If the government mandated that you were required to strip data from your own photos, you ought to be able to safely ignore that law, on First Amendment grounds.

Published works are automatically copyrighted in most countries, including the USA, because of ratification of international treaties such as the Berne Convention. The old US-specific requirement of marking something as copyright has long gone. (in other countries requirements varied, but e.g. in most Western countries items published anonymously, or published without explicit marking, get full copyright if the creator's identity becomes known. Just because a photograph is unmarked does not mean you can use it without permission!)

However, it's true that if you mark something as copyright you may do better in court, particularly in the USA, and that registering copyright, still available in many countries, can help.

And the solution would be so simple. Well, technically simple, not politically of course.

Copyrights: limit the time of protection to something reasonable, anywhere from 10 to 30 years would be reasonable to me. Not the 100+ years like now. And limit by counting from time of creation, not lifetime of creator plus some time as it is now. For the rest there is not much wrong with copyrights per se.

Those RIAA law suits against file sharers are not to be solved by changing copyright, that needs a different appr

You are confusing damages with punishment. And your assertion that because we have a prison industrial complex now, that we should extend it, does not stand up to scrutiny. Fundamentally your position that society exists to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor, at threat of gun point, shows that the use to which the law is being put is no longer beneficial to society as a whole.

IP is a concept, like prohibition, which has run its course as public policy. Both accomplished the same result: to turn ordinary people into criminals, and to make criminals into enterprises.

We should go back to the original system. 14 years plus a one time (non-automatic) renewal of 14 years. We can grandfather in existing works with a system designed to slowly move them into Public Domain status if their 28 years are up. Say, every 5 years release a decade's worth of material starting with the oldest items. (Assuming we start with the 1930s, it would be 45 years before present day items exit copyright. Plenty of time for copyright owners to milk the last remaining drops of copyright-fuel

My personal view is there is not going to be a legal solution forthcoming because most human beings are not concerned/too ignorant/stupid/illiterate.

Truly, the USA has far bigger problems than excessive copyright protection. I'm concerned, and hopefully not too ignorant/stupid/illiterate, but it's hard to imagine an election where the available candidates agree on all the more important stuff, so that my decision would be based on their stance on copyright.

re: Truly, the USA has far bigger problems than excessive copyright protection:.
Yes: unreviewed and unreviewable drone killings of foreign declared terrorists and of US citizens declared terrorists; border patrol run awry throughout the country and deep into the states and highways well past the actual borders; retroactive okaying of warrantless wiretapping of USA citizens; abuse of civil forfeiture law to increase LEO coffers; declaration of "1st amendment zones" (how brave-new-world double-talky is that

Copyright is a bigger problem than most appreciate. This isn't about free entertainment, this is about legal restrictions on our opportunities to share knowledge. "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I don't want to repeat mistakes because knowledge of them are locked away by copyright.

It isn't about "free entertainment," it's about culture. Art is like science and technology, in that everything new comes from what has come before. Imagine how technology would stagnate if patents lasted a hundred years? That's how culture is stagnating.

OK, you claim that because people have been saying that copyright should be limited in duration for a long time and yet legislators keep extending it ever longer, the people who say that it should be limited have no credibility. I do not follow your logic. I guess what you are saying is that we should just accept copyright law as it is, since people have opposed it for a long time.

It's very simple, I'm not proposing a solution. I'm saying that once copyright got its foot in the door it is now impossible to dislodge or moderate because the forces that have an interest in copyright have more money, time and lobbyists on their hands compared to law professors at universities that would like it to be moderated. Hence I pointed you to those sites so that you could learn these things. Looking at the evidence (over 100 years of copyright law). The same argum

OK, so what you are saying is that people should give up on fixing copyright because people have been talking about doing so for over 100 years and the problem has only gotten worse. Further you are of the opinion that people who propose fixing copyright must be ignorant of the history of attempts to implement the solution they propose because otherwise they would know that fixing copyright was hopeless and give up (ignoring the possibility that people are aware of the history but still hope that maybe they

Since copyright is only a temporary protection before a work goes into the public domain we need to take steps for preservation.

A copyright holder should have the duty to take sufficient measures that the work is still existant when it is ready to enter the public domain. And that means backups.
We have lost quite a lot of movies and semi-lost a lost of books, TV shows, radio recordings and whatnot to fire, negligence and not interest to publish it.

In other words, whenever I create something, I have to make sure a copy will survive for 75 years after my death? That seems like a rather harsh burden, and I really don't think I should be responsible for what happens after my death.

I have stuff I've already lost, and that's OK with me because it wasn't very good. There's some stuff that exists in only one easy-to-lose copy. The more recent possibly significant stuff is backed up in the cloud, but free services don't guarantee to be around for 75 yea

This alone is an interesting question. How much work does one have to put in locating a work's copyright holder? How much effort do we have to put into remembering that information?

The summary already presents an interesting case: Facebook stripping metadata, such as the author name, from copies of works they receive. A short while later no-one can remember who it was from; so it is orphaned now? This would open an avenue of legal infringement. Especially with smaller works like photos it may be hard to find the original maker if the metadata is gone. Or should we consider such orphans as "copyright protected" and prohibit any further distribution unless the distributor can show they have the rights?

It's not exactly easy. Especially in this digital age where information can be wiped or added without a trace. Metadata can be stripped, it can also be added or changed, and then it becomes hard to prove which version is the original.

If you find a photo and you don't know who made it -- what is it to you? Why do you need to be able to use it? If it's that important, pay a photographer to make a similar one, or make it yourself. Easy.

Sometimes it's more important what it's a photo of. Not everthing can be replicated.

If you don't know what photographer took an old photo of one of your dead parents should you have to make yourself a criminal in order to make copies before it can degrade?

under the current system you do.You may not get caught but that's beside the issue. as it stands you could be sued if the photographers grandchildren ever found out that you had made copies for your family members.

but lets take your approach: if it's that important we can always just dig up the corpse and pay a photographer to make a similar one, or make it ourselves. Easy.

oh. wait. in the real world your "sollution" is os obviously stupid that I can't believe you didn't realise that it's impractical. you know it's stupid but you parrot it anyway.

Indeed any photo of anything which can't be reproduced hits the same problem. a dead person. a long gone building. a historic event.

If you can't find the guys who snapped the photo or figure out who his estate reverted to then you cannot legally make a copy. You can only leave the origional to rot and degrade taking the fine details of whatever it records with it.

you could ignore the law and make yourself a criminal which is what people already do but any law which makes everyone a criminal is a broken law.

Sometimes it's more important what it's a photo of. Not everthing can be replicated.

And that irreplicability is sometimes what's called "art". Your example's a fairly good one: the restoration of a cherished family portrait or similar. That's one of the reasons why orphaned work legislation is considered inevitable by many (see the summary). But making that orphan works law happen relies on some manner of preventing the accidental (or even malicious) orphaning of modern works that may be suitable for mass consumption (a picture of a nice sunrise, an amateur reportage shot from a warzone

That just means those who already have money will register any- and everything habitually, while amateurs get screwed over further for no reason other than corporations having easier access to their works.

As long as it's a google-like free system then it doesn't screw the poor over any more than the rich.

Everyone gets easier access.Not just corporations. You might as well attack public right of way laws because it allows corporations employees to walk over your land or public libraries because it allows corporations to educate their workers without buying your books.

I've done a quick word search for that and you're the only one saying "at a small price" as far as I can see. unless I missed something in my earlier comments I always said "free" or at worst "ideally free".

As long as it's a google-like free system then it doesn't screw the poor over any more than the rich.

A Google-like free system, you say? You mean one that's constantly mining your data in order to advertise to you more and more in multiple media, while riding roughshod over creators' rights right up until the point where they're sued, at which point they strike a deal which is to their best interests but leaves the content creator with 1% of sweet FA?

There's no such thing as a free lunch -- someone's going to have to pay, and right now world's governments are mostly beating the "small government" drum (an

Google-like as in searchable like a google search where similar works can be found quickly and easily.The point was that the technology exists.

believe it or not legal deposit libraries exist and have existed in the UK for a long long time and are traditionally publicly funded with the works stored within availible to the public.They're not remotely controversial.

for no sane reason whatsoever you seem to have a problem with the idea of public domain works, works on which the copyright has ex

Just to be clear since I'm sure you're going to act the jackass and fill any blanks I don't explicitly cover with some strawman: legal deposit libraries exist in almost all first world countries. sometimes a company may have the contract for maintaining them but they're still libraries open to the public where you can go in and read the books.

for no sane reason whatsoever you seem to have a problem with the idea of public domain works, works on which the copyright has expired, being used by companies.
You don't seem to get the point of public domain. it's not reserved for amatures and hobbyists. Everyone gets to use it.
Including big evil companies.

When your copyright expires it stops being yours. Evil corporations and hobbyists alike gets to use it whether you like it or not.

It no more has to be international than copyright terms have to be international and perfectly synchronised. which they're not.

For no sane reason whatsoever, you have missed the point. I'm not against the public domain, and I am personally working on a system that will (hopefully) allow me personally to derive profit from public domain works. What I'm against is giving a private body a monopoly on storing in-copyright works that means that they (and only they) will have a complete database of out-of-copyright works to exploit when copyright expires, whereas other companies will have to go out of their way to collect and pay for t

A deposit library isn't a digital entity though, and the library still must do considerable work to render their materials into a reproducible state. A digital deposit library... well, ever New Year's Day they'd be able to flip a switch and republish anything and everything for their profit, leaving their competitors trailing in their dust....

And why resort to insults? Why not just engage in an adult-like debate?

Stunningly easy sollution: either run them as a public entity like current deposit libraries accessible to all or if you really want a company to run it then include in the contract that they must give copies of the database of all public domain material to other entities. you'll notice that many countries have multiple such libraries.

Adding "on a computer" to the description doesn't make things strange and scary.

Yes, but the Library of Congress isn't a corporation. As I said, today's politicians won't create new public stuff -- only private stuff. I wouldn't have a problem with a digital deposit library in public hands, only one in private hands.

That just means those who already have money will register any- and everything habitually, while amateurs get screwed over further for no reason other than corporations having easier access to their works.

Once something is published, it is no longer 'their' work. The only reason that people have any ability to control what happens to 'their' work once they make it public is because the public voluntarily decides to refrain from using the now public work.

Only in a democracy. And I'd remind you, the US is not a democracy. It was supposed to be a constitutional republic, but turned into a corporate oligarchy instead. The one thing it is not is a democracy.

The mistake you make is in thinking these laws were (or should have been) passed for your benefit. They were not. They were passed to benefit the largest copyright holders, those that can afford to litigate. They do that very well.

So you think because the image might have some fraction of relevance to you that you have the right to use it even if you don't know who the person who took the picture is? Entitled much?

The system in this regard isn't broken. You just think you have more claim to something than you really do just because someone in the picture is a family member.

Yet you are arguing that the photographer's descendants should be entitled to a continual cut for something their grandfather did, and that the photograph must not be preserved if there are no descendants.

I might just about buy the descendants-get-a-cut part if it was something like a major film that benefited many, but in the example you're arguing with, the photo is only important to that one family and it's essentially being held hostage by the photographer's descendants. The essential point of being able to record media is to allow a creator's works to survive after they are gone, after all...

But who would be harmed if copyright expired in this case? The photographer? He has no way of profiting from the photos, since no one even knows who took them.The only thing that copyright achieves in this case is to make us loose parts of our history, since we can't preserve them legally.

Yes, I also think I have the right to use the image in such a context. I also believe there should be no copyright protection for non-commercial use of anything by individual persons (as opposed to organizations), as it happens, of which this is a special case.

We shouldn't even be considering metadata as some kind of legal standard for determining ownership. It is trivially easy to forge or deliberately remove so that someone could claim the work was orphaned.

A simple solution to this problem already exists: search engines. If you are a photographer who cares about his photos you can create a web site with them on and search engines will index it. Anyone can then do an image search based on their copy and find your site. The system could be improved by allowing i

Currently you can not search Google for images: you can only search image meta data. If you want an image of a cow, you can search for images that say they are an image of a cow, but whether that image actually contains a cow or not, Google doesn't know. Also many images with a cow in it will be missed because no-one added a description to it. You may have noticed how few image search results you get are from sites like Flickr, even though they have million

I'm this far down and I seem to be missing something. Why do you (for example) have a copy at all? This is what I see as the big coming collision of the Sharing 2.0 web. Let's say I upload a picture to my website or YouTube channel, meta-data it, register it, and all. Why do any other copies go anywhere at all?

It's because we have an old web culture to the point of "if it's cool I'll share it" and then someone *forwards a copy*. BANG. That's where all the stuff the music industry has been doing kicks in. Th

I run a few hobby sites devoted to vintage model boats and associated equipment. Google 'Keil Kraft EeZeBilt boats' for an example if you're interested...

Old model boat kits and plans from the 1950s or earlier are part of our social history. But they are (were) copyrighted and so the few people who have them in their collections frequently won't copy the data. We are generally talking about older people here - say, 50 years old and upward. They were brought up to obey the law, and are scared of the news rep

That's why the law can't say "metadata is eternal", but must force a balanced, sensible definition of which metadata can be stripped. The GPS coordinates and the camera settings are irrelevant to copyright law -- they don't identify the author, after all -- so can be stripped. It's circulating a photo without identifying the author that creates accidental/incidental orphans....

GPS coordinates help determine in what jurisdiction the work was created, as countries' copyright terms for photographs vary. They have to be stored with at least enough precision to distinguish, say, Netherlands from Liechtenstein or Italy from San Marino.

Copyright terms are a farce. The emperor has no clothes. It's completely distorted for how long the terms are. What should they be? 20 years for video, audio, and written works. 10 years for software as that changes so fast.

If I'm ever brought before a judge for the contents of my hard-drive I'll plead guilty to everything within the above given terms and no contest for everything older.

That's kind of the opposite of the Public Domain. The Public Domain says "you can use this for whatever you want to use it for." You're proposing "you can use this for anything you want, but you can't make any money off of it." This can also get into all kinds of legal wrangling. Are ads on your website - intended to cover costs - profit makers? Can you make derivative works and profit off them?

It'd change that to No-one can use the material to make a profit without the consent of the author for, I don't know 20 years or so?

That way there would be an incentive to release compilations like 'greatest hits of X', reviving old works while rewarding both the author and the one doing the reviving. Of course people would be free to find or copy works on their own and those would be free.

Once the term expires NO-ONE can use the material to make a profit. If you don't add that - then companies will simply get the material and hold it for 10 years, then make obscene amounts whilst giving the originator nothing at all, not even a nod.

That's just stupid -- no publisher will want to do that. -- once Foundation is in the public domain, anybody can publish it, not just Asimov's publisher.

They would have a ten year monopoly on publication. After ten years the monopoly ends, which is as it should be

(b) Removal or Alteration of Copyright Management Information.— No person shall, without the authority of the copyright owner or the law—(1) intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information,(2) distribute or import for distribution copyright management information knowing that the copyright management information has been removed or altered without autho

The solution to bad laws is not more bad laws. The reason we got into this mess is because of copyright, and the idea that websites like Facebook have any right whatsoever to your creative rights beyond non-exclusive publication. If you want to set things right, start by making the authorship rights of the individual who made the creative work something that cannot, by any contract or legal instrument, be abridged in any way. Oh, I know, businesses everywhere will be screaming bloody murder: What about our marketing? Our advertising! Oh however will we pay the bills without access to all your personal data! It's easy: Clicking like isn't a creative act. Telling people your likes and dislikes isn't a creative act. Creating metadata based on creative works (like keywords being used in status updates or comments) isn't a problem either -- in fact, the company can happily claim copyright to the resulting database and use it however it wants. And that's what most of the marketing and crap is based on. That's where the money comes from.

And one more thing: Those rights aren't transferrable or abridgable in any way, nor are they exclusive... but they do expire at the time of your death. No hand me downs for the relatives. No "150 years plus the life of the author" crap. No: Once you're dead, everything you ever said is fair game for the general public. You're the only one that should be allowed to benefit from your own work, and once you're dead, there's no more benefit to be had... so the rest of the world can reproduce your work freely... They just have to give you credit, like always.

Don't get into this argument about who owns what and derivative works and derivative derivative works and works for hire, and blah blah blah. It's a trap. An Ackbar trap, even. The moment you start to play that game, you lose, because there'll always be another argument, another subtle change, another justification. No. If you want to get a handle on intellectual property, you draw a firm line in the sand and say "This far, no farther." You do not ask for new laws to patch up old ones -- you get rid of the bad laws, strip it down to the bare metal, and then build it up right.

So... if I want to make a multi million dollar movie of a book and the negotiations are going badly the cost for the rights has an upper bound as the cost of having the author quietly killed?

If you work 10 years on creating a book which does well you get to provide for your family for a few years.If you work 10 years on creating a book which does well but then get cancer your dependents are shit out of luck it goes straight into the public domain.

Quite right: the answer is to pass some good laws, such as those that prohibit stripping ownership information from creative works. Now they may make a balls-up of the legislation (in fact they probably will), but as with many laws throughout history (but not so many these days), the underlying principle is (correctly) designed to serve the public good.

I'm mostly with you, but expiration on death is a really bad idea as it give would-be users an incentive to kill the authors. I'd much rather go with a fixed, short protection period, and then public domain.

Maybe the solution is to only ban the deletion of some metadata by anyone except the creator of the data.. This would include the creation date and the creator or copyright owner, and allow other metadata to be deleted. This would prevent the problem of premature orphaning whilst preserving any privacy issues.

Alternatively, as far as privacy issues are concerned, the creator is at perfect liberty to edit the metadata, to remove anything which they do not want published, before uploading/sharing/dist

So you just introduce a law that anyone who publishes an image, video or audio file electronically is not allowed to remove any author attribution metadata from file as they received it. This is in effect enforcing article 6bis or the Berne Convention

Independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation.

Is this a serious honest to goodness question? Is it a joke? Is someone making a funny?

The answer is quite easily no, we should not make laws against stripping metadata. That is quite possibly one of the most absurd notions I've heard in a while. Lets take bad laws, learn from them, and then make worse laws! That will solve our problems, alright!

Not intentionally so, but rather a consequence of an entirely different copyright law. European union copyright directive:

1. Member States shall provide for adequate legal protection against any person knowingly performing without authority any of the following acts:(a) the removal or alteration of any electronic rights-management information;(b) the distribution, importation for distribution, broadcasting, communication or making available to the public of works or other subject-matter protected under this Directive or under Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC from which electronic rights-management information has been removed or altered without authority, if such person knows, or has reasonable grounds to know, that by so doing he is inducing, enabling, facilitating or concealing an infringement of any copyright or any rights related to copyright as provided by law, or of the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC.

2. For the purposes of this Directive, the expression "rights-management information" means any information provided by rightholders which identifies the work or other subject-matter referred to in this Directive or covered by the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC, the author or any other rightholder, or information about the terms and conditions of use of the work or other subject-matter, and any numbers or codes that represent such information. The first subparagraph shall apply when any of these items of information is associated with a copy of, or appears in connection with the communication to the public of, a work or other subjectmatter referred to in this Directive or covered by the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC.

Exact details will vary by country. The EU directives say what a country must achieve, it's up to them how they will do it.

The EU Directive is a result of the WIPO Copyright Treaty and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. Both those treaties require members to protect rights management information from alteration or removal and provide penalties. The U.S. has a similar implementation [cornell.edu] as the EU directive.

I'm not sure how Facebook's stripping metadata wouldn't violate the plain language of this law, but I'm sure they have some fine print somewhere that makes it legal.

There used to be a very simple mechanism for protecting works to become orphaned: authors registered them with the Library of Congress. This also ensured that the work eventually could enter the public domain.

It was greedy European publishers that killed this, and then forced the US to comply. And now they are using orphan works legislation to enrich themselves; if you look at the European proposals for orphan works, they want to charge for the reproduction of such works and then redistribute the money to current publishers and authors. That is not how orphan works are supposed to work.

We should bring back mandatory copyright registration; it's the only sensible way of dealing with orphan works and the public domain.

The reason to lobby for "orphaned works" legislation instead of fixing copyright terms is the fact that Big Media will never allow copyright terms to be shortened. But - being really easy to locate and immortal - they have nothing to fear from orphaned works exceptions, so that's an opening for others to chip away at the copyright monopoly.

Are the people proposing this micromanagement of my photos the same ones who are demanding a free and unregulated internet? It's like making it illegal to copy a paper photo without including any comments that were penciled in on the back.
I do include the metadata on my photos whenever possible, but I prefer to do it voluntarily.

I've published several pseudononymous and anonymous works in various media which I dont want associated with my or my family's name for various reasons. Someday they may become "orphaned works" but I'm curious how the greed of others to access these trumps my right to anonymity and privacy.